Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Link: http://www.netflix.com

I was writing a comment on the NetFlix blog (about when captions won't appear in Instant....and that one of the reasons I prefer DVDs to watching in a theater is that I can have english subtitles to follow along with all the dialog. I also often turn on closed captions on my TV.....)

Anyways...I then realized I've been a NetFlix subscriber for more than 10 years now.

I rented my first DVD's on in January 1999 (shortly after the purchase of my first DVD player -- a post Xmas clearance). This was back when it was pretty expensive to rent a DVD by mail by the week, there was reasonable grace time around the rental period to allow for the post office to misplace the DVD for a week (a problem to continues to happen). Though NetFlix offered value packs to bring the average cost down. Used to be that you told Netflix when you had mailed it back, and you didn't have to wait so long before reporting a problem had happened somewhere in the return trip...or occasionally on getting the selection.

Only once did I get the wrong selection in the mail from them. Which was bad, because I didn't get the usual confirmation that I had returned that wrong selection and had to declare the correct selection as being lost. Even though I emailed them explaining what had happened. I think they have the ability to report that online now though.

Anyways, after my first two trial selections, for $7....I got a 30 pack for $141 and then a 40 pack for $162.55. During the 40 pack, NetFlix switched to its Marquee program. Which I transitioned to in November of 1999. Back then it wasn't unlimited, so I did have to pay overage fees for the first few months.

I've stayed with the same plan all this time....it did become an unlimited plan and allows instant (something I didn't get to trying until the feature appeared on my TiVo HD's

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